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In the last weeks I been spending more than a fair bit of time working on what I consider the basic desktop, you know what we usually know as KDE that will be reincarnated soon in 4.10...

The focus so far as been mostly in decluttering most of the visual junk that had no functionality, In a way making our KDE more simple without making it more "dumb".

So far I'm happy with a new wallpaper still a W.I.P. (I for some reason hallways need to start with a new wallpaper canvas.)

Me and Marco Martin moved into clean air a "bit" and I'm really happy with the progress so far.

We are also trying to improve some fundamental aspect of oxygen windeco in correlation with how apps can use it, for example letting apps use some features of oxygen automaticly.
The test app for this as been decided to be Gwenview. And if all goes well we get this on kde 4.10.....

Sooooo, I start to look at the app this week end and I notice that the Background is a solid dull colour, and I thought.....hummm... "a texture would be much nicer" sooo I get to do one..... Problem (there is always one right?) textures need to be tested....So I had to make a little demo QML app to test a texture.... The result (texture not the QML) is what you can see above, plus a black opacity mask on top so that one can make it more or less dark depending on what you like best...

But once I created the little demo I could not resit and expand it into including possible replacement for the thumbnail view in Gwenview. (don't like it much)
The result can be seen in the video down here ;)...

I'm not sure Aurélien Gâteau will be interested in using any of this (I'm sure my code is way to messy to be used in any way and he probably as a much more efficient code under the current gwenview) , hopefully the noise texture will be ok to be used and that was the point. But its fun what one can do in QML over a few hours of trial and error code/design.

Any way and more importantly 4.10 is looking like our best KDE Desktop ever ;)

I'm all in favor of the textured background, but not so much the added shadow around the picture.

Especially if the image itself already has a shadow or border, or contains (semi-)transparent parts near the edge, it will probably look weird and make it difficult to see where the image ends and the viewer UI begins.

Unless of course you want to to narrow Gwenview's scope to become a pure photo viewer (rather than a generic digital image viewer), in which case those problems don't apply...